“The advertising industry is evolving and growing at an incredible pace, moving increasingly toward online and IP-served platforms, which dramatically increases the importance of software for this industry,” said a statement from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Today’s announcement represents the next step in the evolution of our ad network.”

Yeah, it’s getting crazy. Google, Yahoo and MSFT are now all in the SEO biz. The scary thing is if they all look at each other and decide, “let’s just keep the SEO units”. When just one of them owned an SEO firm, the others could point fingers, now they all have a reason not to spin-off the SEO units – cos everyone else has one. 😉

Does this signify the death of the large-business-client for the independent Online Agency or Consultant? With the one stop shops these acquisitions are creating and unsettled talk of MicroHoo, I can’t see Agencies competing against G,Y,M for Fortune 1000 Companies when Agencies would be left competing directly with the traffic source.

When you consider how engines currently provide FREE tools and advice to optimize ad-revenue to any size advertiser, the inevitability of PPA model adaptation through engine’s content networks (current and recently acquired), and the possibility of two traffic sources in Google and MicroHoo creating an advertising oligopoly, what’s left?